Six weeks in, and I have to admit that I’m starting to get a bit bored with my elimination diet. Who wouldn’t? I mean, things like coffee, chocolate, wine, bread and pasta are some of the food groups I enjoy most in life. I’m just hoping I’m not going to have to permanently give them up—I sort of doubt I will, but there does seem to be something to this paleo approach to eating and how much better it’s making my body feel, so there must be something to it.

Pulled Pork, Collard Greens and Baked Sweet Potato

But it does get a tad boring trying to come up with different meats to eat, especially when I need to have protein at every meal. The problem with having to eat so much meat is that I’ve just never been someone who cooks much meat—because I don’t usually eat much of it, at least not at home. Plus I’ve had a weird thing about eating things on bones since I had to chop chickens when I cooked at a camp before college. Having to cut through chicken breast plates helped turn me into a vegetarian for five years in my late teens and early 20s. And although I stopped being a full vegetarian long ago, I have continued to eat a mostly vegetarian diet since then until I went on this paleo protocol.

On Memorial Day, I decided to try my hand at pulled pork since I need a variety of meats and I figured I could freeze a bunch of it. Unlike my inability to wing baking, I feel OK about winging other types of recipes, as long as I have some guidance. What I really need help with when cooking “big” meat like this is timing and temperature though since I usually only have “big” meat at the holiday time and I frankly usually leave the cooking and prep of that to my brother and sister-in-law while I take care of the sides.

I looked up a few recipes to get an idea of how long to cook it for and then decided to try to come up with my own dry rub. Most pulled pork recipes tend to have nightshades in the rubs—things like cumin or chili powder, both of which are no-nos right now. But I figured I could probably do something with more than just salt and pepper, so I used cinnamon, onion powder, garlic and some other spices. It did turn out a tad salty, though, so I’d probably need to cut down on the amount of salt next time.

Oh, I also tried another baking recipe this week—this time I cheated a bit and used eggs as called for. I needed to bring treats to a poetry class I’m taking and I had some bananas that needed to be used, so I decided to make banana bread. The eggs seemed to save the day when it comes to the paleo baking, so I’ll be excited to get to have those again someday instead of failing to make a substitute using gelatin.

If there’s a lot of grease in the pan at the end, remove meat from roaster/dutch oven and put it in a large bowl.

Pull apart using two forks.

Serve with barbeque sauce.

AIP Friendly Barbeque Sauce

I have to give credit where credit’s due for this one. This is a riff off of Mickey Trescott’s Cherry Barbeque sauce. I used nectarines, but I think a variety of fruits could be good for this type of sauce, from cherries to peaches or plums or blueberries or apples depending on what you like…

AIP Friendly Barbeque Sauce

1-2 tbsp. coconut oil

1 red onion, diced

¼- ½ tsp. garlic powder

3 nectarines, pitted and diced

¼ c. maple syrup

¼ c. apple cider vinegar

1-2 tsp. liquid smoke

Salt

Pepper

Melt coconut oil in saucepan.

Saute onion until soft.

Add remaining ingredients. Bring to a low boil and cook down until sauce begins to thicken–about 20 minutes or so.

After last week’s sweet and bread-texture cravings, I decided to try to hand at autoimmune paleo (AIP) baking last week. OMG—what a joke.

Yup, baking is a science, and I am no scientist. (I’m a writer for Chrissakes…) I tried making paleo muffins and they were a total mess. They baked through, but they just didn’t hold together. I literally had to scoop my muffins out of the tins with a spoon each time I wanted to eat one—and then they crumbled like a Vegas hotel being imploded.

I’m a pretty decent cook but I don’t bake that often. And baking is the one type of cooking where I don’t mess with the recipes. I’m confident enough at other types of cooking to completely wing it, but I just don’t know enough about the properties of things like flours and the ratios of liquids to dry ingredients, rising agents, why you need eggs, etc. to wing it as a baker.

Muffin Fail!

Which is exactly why my baking failed last week.

Since the AIP diet is so limited in what ingredients are OK, baked goods and desserts are difficult. I did a lot of searching online for some recipes that used coconut flour but a lot of them still used some sort of other booster flour—like almond flour, which I can’t have in the elimination phase of this diet since I’m not allowed to have nuts—and last week proved that I might have a problem digesting nuts, so I wasn’t about to try a nut flour, cheat again and end up with another two days of going back to a sour tummy.

I was able to find a coconut flour cookbook (actually called The Coconut Flour Cookbook) at a local grocery store, so I decided that if I was going to try some baking, I’d need some guidance. The thing that I liked about this particular cookbook was that it had a lot of different recipes, not just sweets—it had recipes for things like crepes, pizza crust, etc. all of which could come in useful as I continue this diet.

I’d been craving some sort of apple and cinnamon muffin type thing, and I found a recipe for cinnamon bun muffins. But did I follow the recipe? Uh, no. I thought I could do my usual jazz-it-up scheme and add applesauce to the recipe and also skip the eggs. WRONG! I had found some recipes online for “gelatin” eggs – using gelatin as a substitute for eggs, presumably as a binder. And did I listen to the people that said I needed to use the red can of Great Lakes gelatin to make gelatin eggs instead of the green can, the one that I’m using for my daily gelatin supplement. No.

So the first issue was that the gelatin “eggs” I attempted didn’t really gel. I think they were supposed to actually gel. But I threw the mixture into the recipe anyway and with the applesauce. The batter turned out pretty thick. And of course I didn’t really read through the entire recipe (another thing I have a tendency to do) and I forgot to layer the batter with cinnamon topping, so I had to pour it on top and then stir up the contents of each muffin cup to distribute it. Oooops…

And the muffins just didn’t stand up or really bind together. I think the issue may be the lack of real eggy stuff. Oh, well. Also, after not having sugar for a few weeks, I have to remember that maple syrup goes a long way—the muffins seemed way too sweet to me. I probably should have cut down the syrup in the recipe.

Lesson learned—when baking, I, at least, need to follow a recipe!

I also made some Brussels sprouts last week—those I can wing with confidence!